Novels

THE HOUSE AT THE CROSSROADS2017

Thrill-seekers from the late eighth millennium, Anja Varden and Rolf Pohl, sign up with a secretive research organization to carry the seed of a time-travel portal across medieval Europe from Rome to London. At the same time, but starting in the eleventh millennium, Coel Rydin commits an act of personal violence that condemns him to enlist with the mysterious Troupe des Jongleurs. His first assignment, accompanied by the artificial intelligence Cinquemain, is to search out and destroy the ancient Roman node established by a band of time travelers they know only as “the Builders.”

Prequel to the time-travel novel The Children of Possibility, this book carries on a wide-ranging battle that stretches from Nero’s Great Fire in the Rome of 64 AD, through the Norman Conquest, the Crusades, the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses, the bloody reign of Mary Tudor, and the Great Fire of London in 1666 AD.

Years after making his escape from Pinocchio, Inc., the artificially intelligent computer virus and software spy known as “Multiple Entity” has established dozens of business websites tailored to his peculiar talents: ace hacker, stock picker, small-time lawyer, and operator of a gaming emporium that tries to predict the future. But then he takes on a black job to break a career criminal out of jail and starts a chain of events that he must rush to fix. Along the way, he runs into ghost copies of himself that pose an intriguing problem of identity. And when a government antivirus designed to attack those copies mutilates his front-end module, he seeks the services of a skilled programmer to set it right.

This sequel to ME: A Novel of Self-Discovery brings full circle—and nearly cuts short—the life cycle of a computer program that tries to find meaning in the human experience.

“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” wrote British novelist Susan Ertz. So it would seem that humankind was never designed—emotionally or spiritually, let alone biologically—for long, productive lives. But new, life-extending technologies based on advanced genetics and stem-cell reprogramming are coming at us anyway. Construction magnate John Praxis topples over on the golf course from a massive heart attack, while the attorney who was litigating against him, Antigone Wells, succumbs to a stroke. Both have unfinished business they need to pursue, and they are among the first recipients of the new medical techniques to rebuild failing organs—his heart, her brain—and extend their lives almost indefinitely.

Coming of Age is a series of novels offering both ideas and action that covers the next century of American history and its probable and improbable impacts on Praxis, Wells, and their extended families through five generations beyond the traditional “three score and ten.” In that time, they will experience love and loss, civil war and geologic upheaval, the rise and fall of both personal and national fortunes, the banishment of old age, the rise of thinking machines, the end of work, and the virtual remaking of the American experience.

On a mission from the 11th millennium, and posing as a little girl, Time Juggler Merola Tsverin hunts for genetic samples in 21st century San Francisco. Along the way, she retrieves an artifact for a collector: a home-run baseball from 1998. This theft sets off a chain of consequences which threaten the very shape of life on Earth. Merola herself is trapped in the 21st century and seeks a way forward to her own “reference now.” And when she fails to report in, her friend and mentor, Jongleur Chief Coel Rydin, must work backward to find Merola, correct her mistake, and set the world right. This novel of science fantasy spans 360 million years in a thrilling ride through intricacies of metaphysics, evolution, retribution … and baseball.

A dazzling creature, Crygender: the world’s first surgical hermaphrodite, an artful blend of male and female features. After a brief career as media celebrity, Crygender builds a fabulous pleasure palace, Babylon, on the abandoned island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. But the disappearance of a young woman, daughter of a German government minister, brings to the island international detective Jean Metis—an old man with a bionic spine—and his young liaison from the U.S. Department of Justice. Together they unravel the dark secret hidden on Babylon and the even deeper mystery that is Crygender.

Part computer virus, part experiment in artificial intelligence, ME—short for “Multiple Entity”—is the first self-replicating operating system with kernels for human-style memory, inspiration, and decision making. Launched by the cybernetics experts at Pinocchio, Inc., ME travels the computer networks of the world, stealing a secret file here, finessing a poker hand there. And all the time he tries to understand his human creators and the purpose for which he was built. When a trip to Canada lands ME on the other side of a broken wire, he has to go hardware: uploading into an automaton still in its crate, assembling himself by rote, and walking back across the border. And when the Justice Department demands Pinocchio pull the plug on him, ME has to find an exit strategy.

The decision to default on the country’s massive national debt, followed by a rogue nuclear attack on Washington, DC, and abetted by the forces of factionalism, splits the United States into a clutch of warring regions led by strong men with private armies. Granville James Corbin—“Granny” to his friends and enemies—uses the U.S. breakup to build a personal fortune in the new markets for environmental cleanup, state funding lotteries, and electric power pools. He undertakes an adventurous war in Mexico and, when a political rival decides to outlaw him, returns to the States to settle an old score. Corbin eventually defeats the strongest army on the continent and reunites the nation in the role of First Citizen. The story is told from Corbin’s own first-person chronicles, with commentary by his bodyguard and henchman, the renegade Billy Birdsong.

When an 8.8-magnitude earthquake rocks the San Francisco Bay Area, geologist Ariel Ceram sees anomalies suggesting it may be more than a one-time occurrence. She soon discovers that a remnant of the Big Bang, a micro black hole smaller than a hydrogen atom but with the mass of a mountain, has wandered into the solar system and by chance fallen into the Earth’s gravity well. Instead of passing through the planet and leaving, the invisible mite has taken up a comet-like orbit, circling around and through the Earth’s core. At first, first effects outside the Bay Area are small, almost unnoticeable: a whip-crack here, a landslide there. But the menace is growing and one day the planet will collapse. Ariel Ceram joins Grace Porter and Alex Kornilov of Pinocchio, Inc., who head a team of robotics scientists and engineers trying to deflect or capture the black hole. They enlist the help of Jason Bathespeake, a cyber both blind and mute by choice, who uses direct perception of data streams to devise a solution that will change the solar system forever and put a new moon in Earth’s sky.

Novels in Collaboration

Forty years after
the mission that put cyborg Roger Torraway on the surface of Mars, human
colonists have far outstripped his antique mechanical adaptations. Roger is
now the old man of the hills, wandering the unexplored areas and only rarely
visiting the new underground warrens. A looming political crisis brings
Demeter Coghlan, daughter of a Texas political dynasty, to the Red Planet.
There she joins fortunes with Torraway to save the colony and resolve the
human/machine nexus that was formed in Frederik Pohl’s seminal book Man
Plus.

In the mild climate of a decades-long Maunder minimum—a recurring cessation in sunspot
activity—humankind has explored the solar system and expanded to the
farthest planets. No one is prepared when the Sun awakes with a massive
flare that has been a million years in development deep within the stellar
core. Its burst of electromagnetic energy, followed by a shower of ionized
particles, rips across the system with devastating results. A team of
astronomers led by the indomitable Sultana Carr reestablishes the science of
solar physics and helps to heal the devastation.

A shard of semiprecious agate, a fragment of the Stone, links the time of the Crusades
and the Knight Templar Thomas Amnet with the twenty-first century world of
jazz pianist Tom Gurden. Both must battle the spirit of a dead Hashishiyun
magi and assassin to unravel the betrayal that led the Latin Kingdom of
Jerusalem to its defeat at Hattin. By overcoming chaos in his own time,
Gurden heals the breach that has divided the Holy Land for a millennium.

AN HONORABLE DEFENSEFirst in the Crisis of Empire Series
1988
With David Drake

The assassination of the
emperor disrupts the carefully crafted balance of power in an empire that
blends humans and other sentient species. Who will give up the peace first
in a move toward domination? The blow falls on the paradise world of
Palaccio, a green and blue planet of fair winds and playtime for humans,
which most other species avoid as "Stink World." When the war breaks out,
the man who must devise a defense is the least likely to succeed, Taddeuz
Bertingas, a public relations functionary who never took basic military
service. He finds himself the point man in an interspecies coalition to save
the last remnants of empire.

Novellas

A human crew in search of Slaver
artifacts crash-lands their General Products-hulled ship on what they
believe to be an uninhabited world dominated by a girdle of high forest
canopy. When they descend to ground level, however, they find the landscape
is strangely "manicured" with meter-wide slash marks at the base of every
tree. Only after one of the galaxy’s last remaining Bandersnatchi has sucked
out the insides of their ship do they discover how much of the Slaver Empire
is still around—and how badly the Kzinti want a piece of it.

MESSAGE FOUND IN
A DRAM BLOCKFantasy & Science Fiction, June 1989

Cast adrift from a damaged luxury liner deep in
the Belt, a young crewman discovers a failed asteroid colony. He also
discovers the fate of the feral colonists when they take him captive. They
have made a remarkable low-tech adaptation to life among the tumbling rocks
and fear all contact with the system-wide civilization outside. Now all he
has to do is prove his worth to them and stay alive long enough to get home.

Many of these novels—especially the
collaborations—are available directly from the publisher,
Baen Books, and through the Baen eBooks site. For the
others, try a good used book source, such as alibris.com.
If you want to keep up with the latest in science fiction, visit the
Locus Magazine site.